Category Archives: Craft Project

Do you guys decorate for Memorial Day? I love putting out some cute red, white, and blue decor to celebrate the beginning of Summer. Memorial Day is also when we put our flag up, which stays out pretty much through Labor Day.

Last year I found the “USA” and stars wooden decorations at the ($3) dollar spot at Target. The wreath is a pool noodle, burlap ribbon, & lots of hot glue! I found the paper straws, the jars, and the green container at Michaels. The blue frame is a universal donation center find, which I cleaned up and painted with DIY blue chalk paint.

Do you have any fun plans for the long weekend? We’ve both taken an extra day off work and plan to knock some of our bigger to-do list items off the list before this belly starts getting in the way even more!

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This year we’re hosting friends for New Year’s Eve. Since I didn’t decorate much for Christmas (on account of hanging out poolside in the Dominican Republic last week) I was excited to get a chance to do a bit of decorating. Our Christmas box from the in-laws had these fun Christmas crackers (and that adorable Christmas gnome) and I used them as a jumping off point for my color scheme. As a bonus, it also means that the other red.Christmassy decorations can hang around for another week and look purposeful.

Unfortunately, the party supply stores do NOT agree with my vision for NYE as I couldn’t find any cute party hats / noisemakers (especially at prices I like). So after a little bit of browsing on Pinterest I decided to just update some cheap supplies from the dollar store. Here’s where we started:

And after a quick run to Michaels for some clearance Christmas supplies (a stack of scrapbook paper, some adhesive ribbon, and red scrapbooking bows) and a little bit of patience and scissor-work, I have this instead. I took one hat apart to make a template to cut the paper for the new hats. For the noise makers, I took one apart to use as a template and rip the rest apart and re-used the plastic-noisemaker part.

The little hats on the right are for Penelope and her friend Piper. The dogs need to dress for the party too! FYI, tape alone didn’t work in every case to keep the cones together, so I added a staple to each. So far so good. Oh and since I already had the string from the ugly party hats on hand, I just re-used that, but any thing elastic string would do the trick.

Are you throwing any New Years Eve / New Years Day parties? After our festive NYE we’re heading to friends’ for brunch, so it will be a busy few days for us.

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Nope you’re not having a case of deja vu! This is the second yardstick project in a week. Creating the star was so easy, I just had to try my hand at another project.

This was the perfect rainy Sunday afternoon project & it was twice as fun as I got to rope my cousin who is visiting for Christmas into helping me with the project!

We started with 6 yardsticks and a high-tech sketch. (I used the measurements on the right, as we decided that a one-foot top branch would be too short.)

We used a jigsaw to trim our yardsticks to the desired measurements & reused the cut-off piece from the 20″ branch for the top-most 16″ branch. We gave everything a quick coat of paint & then plugged in our trusty glue gun.

We glued all our “branches” to the “trunk” and then used tiny clothespins (found at Michaels) to each branch to hold up the Christmas cards. We tried to be very careful not to be too exact or to measure things out to give it a more rustic feel.

We also attached this snowflake cut-out (from Michaels) as our tree topper. We decided not to paint it because we liked the raw wood with the green yardstick tree.

Here it is all finished up & hanging in the dining room with the new buffet & a rather large amount of additional Christmas decorations.

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Last week while perusing Pinterest while watching TV, I spotted Little Bit Funky’s giant yardstick Christmas start & just knew I HAD to have one for myself.

I grabbed 5 yardsticks from Home Depot for just 70 cents each & gave them all a coat of left-over almost-baby-blue paint. (I painted both sides, since they started bowing after the first coat of paint).

Once everything was dry, I simply laid the yardsticks into a star pattern – be patient, it may take a while to get everything lined up just right – and hot glued the sticks together.

I wasn’t planning on adding any lights because I really liked the less than $5 price point & it looks pretty great above the wine bar!

BUT then we received our Christmas care package from the in-laws & my mother-in-law had tucked a set of mini-lights in as if she somehow knew I’d be needing them.

I carefully wound the string of lights around the star & plugged it into the same timer we use for the Christmas tree. Now we have double the festiveness in our wine bar corner once it gets dark outside!

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I already shared the first version of my DIY Tea Towels (the idea for which I totally stole from Michelle at Decor and the Dog). I am in need of two more housewarming gifts, so I grabbed another set of flour sack dish towels from Target. {I’m painting a green set as well.} Oh and remember that you’ll need to add fabric medium to your paint when painting on fabric!

I decided to switch it up this time. I was super inspired by Remodelaholic’s DIY Confetti Drapes and wanted to try my hand at painting some circles. I followed her tutorial & making the circles were super easy. In retrospect, I wish I had painted more dots (and used more shades of blue), so perhaps I’ll go back in and add more before I gift these.

I also switched up the stripes. This time I did two dark blue stripes on the outside, a lighter blue striped in the middle and two even lighter blue stripes between those. I love how it turned out!

The first two sets of tea towels were well received, so I’m hoping these go over equally well. Oh and look, they even look cute when they’re messy! What do you think – should I add more dots to the confetti dot one?

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The other week I decided to attempt another quick craft. I’ve been trying to figure out what cushion covers I want to make for the love seat in the guest room. I decided to try my hand at using a bleach pen to get some interest patterns on fabric – I was inspired by Megan’s gorgeous bleach pen curtains. Here you can see the squares I drew on the fabric with my bleach pen.
I followed Megan’s instructions, but unfortunately the bleach pen did NOTHING to my fabric. I’m not sure if it was user error or bleach pen error, but something clearly went wrong. In retrospect, I never smelled any bleach, so I’m wondering if somehow the bleach pen went bad? I’d love to try this again. Perhaps using a different piece of fabric & a brand-new bleach pen.

Have you had any success making bleach pen designs?

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If you follow me on Instagram* you probably saw my Sunday at 10pm project – the faux milk glass bottle. It was a fun and easy project. I had peeled the labels off & sent the empty salad dressing bottle through the dishwasher. Then I used some nail polish remover to get rid of the use by date stamp on the glass.

I didn’t take any progress pictures because it’s pretty much exactly as it seems. Squirt paint into bottle. Rotate bottle allowing paint to cover all surfaces. Turn bottle over on a piece of cardboard and allow extra paint to drip out. Turn bottle right side up, wipe excess paint off the bottle mouth & let it dry. {I probably wouldn’t put water in this vase & the paint is definitely not dishwasher safe!}
Since I don’t have any other empty salad dressing bottles (why oh why did I throw all of those other bottles out?) the bottle looked a little lonely. My eye fell on the stack of paint chips that I’ve gathered between looking for the right color for the recently repainted nightstands & the Craigslist bench. I had grabbed a few Glidden swatches, but since I’m now officially a Behr paint convert, I knew I wouldn’t be using those swatches in the future.

Here’s what I grabbed to create my circle art.

A circle punch. Leftover paint chips. Double sided tape squares.

As you can (sort-of) see I got 2.5 circles out of every card. This was exactly the right amount to cover the 5″x7″ frame I had available. I spent some time arranging and rearranging the circles until I was happy with their placement. Then I just slid the circles off the paper & taped them back in the same arrangement. I carefully cut the overhanging pieces off & popped the paper into the frame.
I’m loving the lighter blue colors I used here. Oh and did I mention that I spent $0 on these projects since I already had all of the supplies lying around? Quick AND Budget Savvy Project!

What projects have you started at 10pm?
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